Not quite post-political

The urgent tasks to undertake now … revolve centrally around inventing new modes and practices of collective political organisation … and the mobilisation of a wide range of new political subjects who are not afraid to imagine a different commons, demand the impossible, stage the new and confront the violence that will inevitably intensify as those who wish to maintain the present order realise that their days might be numbered. (Swyngedouw 2014, 134)

This issue goes to press while the ongoing mobilisation in Sudan is being repressed with bloodshed. As of today, this courageous act of defiance and radical political practice and imagination of a people that has been suffering the most brutal political repression calls not only for further analysis: it calls for our immediate and sustained solidarity.

Writing during the crackdown on the Egyptian mobilisation in 2014, Swyngedouw insisted on the importance of prioritising collective political practices of organisation around the question of how to sustain the mobilisation of new political subjects emerging from the politics of Tahrir Square (Swyngedouw 2014). Since 2011, the waves of mass mobilisations in the streets and squares – with Egypt first and then Turkey giving way to a wave that has continued in Tunisia, Algeria and now Sudan – has signalled the ‘incipient return of the political’ (Ibid.).

Relearning what grassroots politics outside and beyond parties is about is an enormous task. On our website Roape.net, Janet Bujra introduced the film about the Connections workshops held across Africa in 2017–2018 (Bujra 2019). Writing about these unusual gatherings of left activists and intellectuals and the debates on radical transformation on the continent, she emphasised that ROAPE ‘is planning to continue the debates and connections in workshops and activities to be held across the continent’ (Ibid.). The Connections Workshop held in Dar es Salaam in April 2018 offered a stimulating space for reflection on the modalities and priorities of this moment of reorganisation (Bujra et al. 2019). Here, Shivji offered a Gramscian interpretation of the incapacity of the left to mould and inform a new common sense. While the old common sense has died, the new one is struggling to emerge; and is shaped by the ruling classes, both within centre-right populist movements and within the more classical far right. Parties on the left have abdicated their role of offering an alternative ideology and found themselves devoid of their foundational political and ideological mission. In organisational terms, the political void where the left should be is an empty wasteland of discontinued political practice. We witness an incapacity to ‘do politics where the masses are – and not simply where (state) power resides’ (Shivji, in Bujra et al. 2018, 618). The emerging right-wing populist common sense is reminiscent of what Gramsci observed during the early emergence of fascism in Italy. The ruling class fabricates a cultural hegemony through a mix of old and new ideas to influence the perceptions of reality and the emotions of the masses, conveying a sense of naturalness of the prevailing order of things, to which there is no alternative. The ‘battle of ideas’ exposes the need to reconstitute the left by starting from its foundational mission of coherently demonstrating the necessity – not only the possibility – of a radical overhaul of the existing order. Programmatically, this entails a rebuilding from the ground up of the international networks that have been crushed during the neoliberal counter-revolution, or have disintegrated from within.

Supporting the incipient return of the political would entail, for example, detecting the ‘everyday acts of resistance’ as the ones ongoing among Zimbabwean miners (see Mutekwe, this issue) and intercepting the solidarity networks these create as a condition on which to build organisationally in revolutionary moments. The continued, covert daily acts of resistance of mineworkers in Zimbabwe – where political repression demobilised miners who now resort to foot-dragging, absenteeism and double-speech as the risks faced by striking in the open are too high – show that Marikana is not an isolated or conjunctural episode: it represents the coming into the open of contradictions and tensions in the African mines. These combine high levels of exploitation with sustained political repression and state violence, in a context where official trade unions are either too close to power or too scared to act more confrontationally. The political work then, especially where the legacies of past leftist movements are ambivalent, consists in a re-engagement with street politics, starting from the youth who tend to keep a distance from the heavy historical legacies of co-opted unions (see Elischer, this issue) or struggle to connect to the successes and failures of past extra-parliamentary movements (see Bianchini, this issue).

On Roape.net, we published a collection of short blogposts on the mobilisations in Sudan and Algeria. The contributors Tin Hinane El Kadi (2019), Lee Wengraf (2019), Magdi el Gizouli (2019) and Heike Becker (2019) agreed that both countries are confronted by a similar challenge: the pacification of these movements in the interests of the local and global ruling classes or their revolutionary takeover which could bring to an end not only the repressive regimes they seek to overturn, but also the class interests they represent.

The ongoing movements signal that Africa isn’t quite post-political. The argument that the depoliticisation of the masses has been sustained by the role of experts and technocracies that turned contentious fields into the domain of neutral administrative issues, technical advice and consultants’ expertise does not seem to apply to the last decade of African politics. More broadly, if it ever was, the post-political is not ruling anymore. Current right-wing austerity politics, and the populism that accompanies it, refuses to accept experts’ knowledge and defames their methodologies.

This will remind some ROAPE readers of the debate on poverty statistics produced by the Rwandan government, scholars’ circumstantiated criticism of the methodologies used and the World Bank’s replies (Roape.net 2019). In the last quarter Roape.net has hosted a post on Rwanda, revealing the methodical faking of the country’s poverty statistics. Until now the working assumption had been that this was a methodological disagreement with the figures but in the end it turns out to be a simple, straightforward and easy-to-prove case of fake statistics. The only reason it had taken so long to prove the manipulation is that our blogger had not imagined the possibility that Rwandan authorities might have misreported their own results, supported by the World Bank. The Bank provides a seal of approval of the fiscal probity of countries on the continent. As a consequence, and directly from the blogpost, the Bank was forced to issue a rebuttal.

Right-wing austerity politics seem to have a hard time with experts’ reports. Contesting ‘the experts’ – with the anti-intellectualism typical of proto-fascist formations – is now common in populist politics, as illustrated by Trump’s reckless climate change denial and by the now common practice of several European governments of rejecting the recommendations of UN rapporteurs on poverty and human rights in austerity Europe. For example, in May 2019 Amber Rudd, the UK’s secretary of state for work and pensions, announced her intention to lodge a formal complaint against the UN rapporteur’s analysis of extreme poverty in the country, which she condemned as a politically biased and methodologically flawed report (Booth 2019). In May 2018, the Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini dismissed criticism from the UN rapporteur on human rights regarding the Italian government’s decision to close all seaports to migrants, noting: ‘we … do not accept lessons from anyone, let alone from the UN’ (Moulson and Keaten 2018). Salvini’s reaction embodies the right-wing populist delusion of restoring national sovereignty against the interference of supranational bodies. This politics fakes defiance against measures imposed from supranational agencies when doing so poses little risk to the economy, while abiding by austerity policies in cowardice – in Italy’s case, as any resistance would be heavily sanctioned by the EU. By contrast, Rudd put forward an argument often used by African leaders: the UN rapporteur had used flawed research methodologies and had not done his homework properly, as he had stayed in the country for a ‘quick and dirty’ visit of only 11 days. These two tactics have more in common than meets the eye. They encapsulate the anti-intellectualism of right-wing populism that has surfaced in the decade following the 2007/08 financial crisis.

The UN rapporteur has compared poverty in post-crisis Britain to the situation of Victorian workhouses. Manchester, which historically hosted the emergence of the Victorian workhouse, is now deindustrialised and the majority of her people – workers and unemployed – experience financialised poverty as exclusion from services which respond to basic needs. At the same time, the Victorian workhouse condition is co-constituted by destitution of the unemployed and by exploitation of workers at the global level. Global value relations connect workers on the world market. The frantic quest to counter the falling rate of profit is expressed in multiple, contradictory and interconnected ways. Capital can push down the price of some commodities, wherever it is possible, to cheapen the cost of workers’ reproduction; it forces workers to underconsume and subsidise their survival through other structures of oppressive domination, mediated by gender and culture. Cheap cotton shirts produced in Ethiopia are bought by the working poor in Manchester, where poverty wages are the order of the day too. Ethiopian workers are now among the cheapest factory workers in the world; the Victorian workhouse is indeed emerging in Ethiopia. A recently reported figure of US$26 as the average monthly wage for factory workers in the industrial park in Hawassa would put Ethiopia below China’s salary levels (Barrett and Baumann-Pauly 2019). Alternative sources report a higher figure for overall average wages in Ethiopian manufacturing at about US$57 (averaged across Chinese-owned, other foreign-owned and Ethiopian-owned firms) with workers in industrial parks getting wages about 19% lower than average; these wage levels do not cover the workers’ monthly expenditures (Schaefer and Oya 2019). The broader national level political context of this shift in Ethiopia is detailed in this issue (see Gebregziabher, this issue).

Poverty wages in Ethiopia rely on the exploitation of the working poor and are enabled by the patriarchal oppression of women and of rural food producers, who shoulder the burden of the social reproduction of workers which poverty wages do not cover. Poverty wages in austerity English cities like Manchester are higher than in Ethiopia. In Manchester today, the working poor, clothed and fed on the cheap, are needed more as consumers than workers; the working poor are trapped in credit-card debt, struggling to buy food, and pay their rent and bills. A study informing the UN report on poverty in the UK argues that the privatisation of basic services in the UK in the late 1980s – water, energy and local bus transport – paved the way for their financialisation, which entailed that ‘the provision of services to meet fundamental human needs has become a source of profit for international financiers. … households, many of which struggle to make ends meet, are in some cases financing interest and dividend payments to the world’s richest via their consumption of basic essentials’ (Bayliss and Mattioli 2018, 4). Energy, bus transport and domestic water provision are offered as future bets to speculate on, in view of their assured future financial returns: basic needs – such as domestic water provision – will always generate demand, no matter how dire. Neoliberal capitalism depends on public support for the political and legal infrastructure needed by financial institutions to expand their operations into new, ‘non-traditional’ sectors. The mediated ways in which basic needs service provision is financialised should not obscure the fact that ultimately financialisation magnifies the extraction of rent from the working poor, as ‘rents extracted from households are now being actively pursued by fictitious capital’ (Purcell, Loftus, and March 2019). Short-term speculative deals have proven to work to the detriment of actual service provision, as investment does not prioritise structural interventions to bring down prices to users, but rather prioritises showcase projects that can increase future bets and further speculation. Deindustrialised cities like Manchester exemplify this process. No longer the workshop of the world, but rather its building site, Manchester is a prime real-estate speculation centre where large private landowners have emerged and drawn huge profits by acquiring decayed property from industrial companies that have gone out of business, getting land on the cheap through takeovers of quasi-public companies, for real-estate and infrastructure speculation (Ward and Swyngedouw 2018). Contemporary highly financialised poverty brings us back to the reality of uneven and combined development and its geographic history.

Articles in this issue

The trajectory of the disintegration of the left is hardly an African specificity, although the specific class dynamics at the national level vary, and much is gained by acknowledging the history and legacies of past leftist movements outside party and parliamentary politics (see Bianchini, and Elischer, both in this issue). Similar issues of political struggle and left politics are discussed on Roape.net, through an interview with Femi Aborisade by Tamás Gerőcs (2019) on Nigerian left politics. From Aborisade’s early days as a labour militant in the 1970s and 1980s, organising and building socialist and labour organisations, the interview moves on to debate the crisis of capitalism in Nigeria today and the struggles against it.

Against this context, this issue includes two articles on the agonising of the left and its historical legacies in two francophone countries – Niger and Senegal – during the neoliberal counter-revolution. This issue also presents some of the political contradictions emerging from finance and rent within the disarticulated patterns of extractivism. The manifestation of many instances of financialised deals is the extraction of rent as the extraction of above average profits (Purcell, Loftus, and March 2019). Monopoly and absolute rents are extracted through finance in service provision as they are in the mining sector. Mining rents have been central to the reproduction of disarticulated accumulation patterns in extractive economies in Africa and elsewhere. For instance, South Africa retains the monopoly of about 80% of the world’s platinum reserves (Bowman, this issue) while the national economy of Niger – which controls 7% of the world’s uranium reserves – disproportionately depends on uranium rents, whose shifting price patterns condition the government’s ability to co-opt political opposition (Elischer, this issue). Financialisation affects the mining sector by increasing the unpredictability of prices and profits and accelerating processes of restructuring, which puts constraints on redistribution of profits coming from mining rents that Bowman calls ‘financialised redistribution’. While the patterns of rent extraction are structured around the geography of uneven and combined development, the flows of financialised rents affect the working poor in Niger as they do in South Africa and the UK, with highly uneven class dynamics that are co-determined by structures of property as well as by relations of production.

The issue opens with a reflection on the current absence of a visible political legacy of the revolutionary moment of 1968/69 in Senegal. Pascal Bianchini documents the university students’ strike in Dakar in 1968. The strike emerged as a protest against the cuts to scholarships and was promptly repressed by the government. When protesters were sent to a military camp, the national labour union (Union nationale des travailleurs du Sénégal – UNTS) met to organise a general strike in solidarity, only to see their meeting suspended and their leaders arrested and sent to another military camp. Repression triggered street riots in Dakar, which led to the resumption of negotiations with protesters, the reopening of universities and the release of detained students and labour union members, followed by negotiated deals. In 1969, when a similar mobilisation occurred, the government at first repressed independent unions and then co-opted some of its elements who joined a newly established national union confederation with close connections to the ruling party and cleansed of elements of radical politics. While state repression increased, the radical left reorganised during the 1970s, by drawing on the strength of historical movements in the country. Offering an original account of the Dakar radical left scene in the 1970s, Bianchini concludes that, while leftist struggles forced the government to shift to multipartyism – with a first opening in 1974 and a fully fledged system in 1981 – throughout the 1990s and 2000s the radical left has been deradicalised through co-optation by the state apparatus, to then eventually abdicate and join the ranks of neoliberal politics (see also an interview with the author, Bianchini and Adekoya 2018).

A similar scenario of demobilisation is offered by Sebastian Elischer’s analysis of Niger’s major labour union – the Union des syndicats des travailleurs du Niger (USTN) – and his discussion of the USTN’s role in a series of political crises in the country. The USTN is an umbrella union for workers in the public sector, established in 1974. Its mobilisation power has strongly influenced national politics between 1990 and 2010, playing a key role in its autocratic breakdowns (1991 and 1999) and the two democratic breakdowns (1996 and 2010). Until 1990 the union was part of the autocratic regime and its workers formed the largest part of formal employment in Niger, attached to the rent economy generated by state-controlled uranium revenues from which the majority of the population is excluded (see also Keenan 2008). USTN was a major player in national politics between 1990 and 1999: it led national protests against structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in 1990 and the ensuing process of regime change, through a four-month-long process of deliberation by the National Conference in 1991, which rejected the Bretton Woods Institutions’ demands, in an effort to protect public services and the civil service. In 1993, the union organised a series of general strikes against cuts in public services, which caused the postponement of austerity reforms. In 1996 a military coup led by Maïnassara led to the marginalisation of the USTN, which was excluded from the deliberations on the new constitutional process. While in 1997 and 1998 the union continued to organise general strikes against SAPs, after the 1999 coup led by Wanké, the USTN lost its power. Tandja’s newly elected government’s stability led to an increase of development aid, joined with rising uranium rents. This allowed the government to respond to the union’s demands. Meanwhile, the emergence of two other unions created fissures that made general national strikes – the major weapon of the USTN – harder to organise and less effective. Tandja’s presidency channelled the country’s rents into the public sector, ensuring compliance and complacency from organised labour. Elischer concludes that there is a clear causation line between union activity and the pace and patterns of democratisation in Niger.

The public sector in Niger is dependent on an extraverted extractive core – uranium rents – and thus the fortunes of public sector workers’ unions are connected to the ability of the state to redistribute variable rents to them. The class contradictions generated by the extraction of rents in the extractive sectors are rendered more rapidly variable by the entwining of finance and rents. A class analysis would appraise the USTN as the labour union of an interest group which depends on rents, whose interests are distinct and often in contrast to those of the majority of the population.

Another instance of this dynamic is what Andrew Bowman calls the ‘black political elite’ emerging from the Black Economic Empowerment programme in South Africa. The broad pattern of accumulation of capital in South Africa is dominated by a core cluster of state-supported industries in the mining and energy sector. As in many other extractive economies across the continent, accumulation depends upon the mining and energy sector in a disproportionate way, because there has been no structural transformation of the economy. Ashman, Fine and Newman (2011) call this extractive core of the economy the ‘minerals–energy complex (MEC)’, which in South Africa depends on the export of raw and semi-processed minerals among which are gold, diamond, platinum, steel, coal, iron and aluminium. Mining constitutes a large share of the deals supported by the deracialisation strategy put in place by the ANC – Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). The BEE strategy in South Africa is dependent on the mining sector, which is extraverted and financialised. Bowman focuses on the Mining Charter in South Africa as a landmark policy for BEE in South Africa, as mining constitutes a large share of BEE deals. Introduced in 2004 after long negotiations, the Charter was repeatedly amended in successive years, most recently in September 2018, amid strong contestation. Ownership transfer is the most contentious element of the Charter. Bowman argues that while BEE initially produced a process of alignment between white and black South African ‘political elites’, this process has now started to unravel because of the failures of many BEE deals, affected by the downturn in commodity prices following the 2007/08 global financial crisis. This ‘financialised redistribution’ led the 2018 revisions of the Charter to shift away from earlier attempts towards radical redistribution of ownership in the mining sector and an overall pro-business attitude that prioritises financial viability and competitiveness of the mines over the redressing of historical injustices and deracialisation. Furthermore, the black political elite has become increasingly fragmented and differentiated in terms of interests, as shown by the intense political contestation inside the tripartite alliance and wide dissatisfaction among the majority of BEE beneficiaries. The financialised core of the economy limits the scope of any redistributional policy, pre-empting the agenda of economic deracialisation. This is a cautionary tale on redistribution based on rent and finance which is not accompanied by a structural transformation of the economy and a radical programme of redistribution of property.

Extractives and labour relations are also at the centre of Paddington Mutekwe’s article on Zimbabwean miners’ everyday acts of resistance. Mutekwe usefully reminds us that the repressive laws enacted in Zimbabwe in 2002 – in particular the Broadcasting Services Act, Public Order and Security Act (POSA) of 2002 – gave state institutions the power to kill anybody who takes part in an unauthorised gathering upon suspicion of having committed or being about to commit a political act. This repressive legal apparatus has set the stage for the state violence and police brutality that has dominated the political scene of the last two decades in Zimbabwe. Mutekwe notes that ‘Trade unions do not advise miners to strike, because they feel that if miners strike they will lose their jobs’ (250). The situation of state control and harsh repression of political activities and gatherings led resistance and collective action to go underground. Labour organisers have to keep a low profile to survive. In the mines, this is compounded by the fact that company managers fire miners who take part in strike actions. Mutekwe details the multiple acts of covert resistance of mine workers and interprets them in line with Scott (1985, 1989) as ‘weapons of the weak’. Adding to the large literature on passive and covert resistance of African workers and peasants, this article reminds us that pilfering, poaching, night harvesting on farms, foot-dragging, and absenteeism cannot happen without the implicit and often tacit approval of the working people, especially those in charge of defending property and safeguarding labour relations. For this reason, while everyday forms of resistance appear to be the opposite of class struggle – the explicitly organised mobilisation of the broad alliances of the working people – they are rather one of the manifestations of the underlying class contradictions and class conflicts that cannot find explicit expression in a context of political repression. While covert resistance is a safety measure aiming at avoiding open confrontation when this would be too dangerous and risky, it emerges from a contradiction and as such it can be channelled in different ways in revolutionary moments: it can work as a conservative reaction against mobilisation, or instead activate the networks it built throughout long periods of covert, individualised actions of struggle.

Tefera Gebregziabher documents the political history of the Metals and Engineering Corporation (METEC), a gigantic Ethiopian business conglomerate led by the military. This emerged in 2010 through the consolidation of 98 state companies, which managed to fuse the nation’s basic metal industries with its engineering industries. This case illustrates an unprecedented move of the Ethiopian government: the creation and entrusting of a huge business conglomerate to the military. The author argues that the military’s management of METEC has been marred by serious delays in projects and deep financial corruption, which have been leading the party-state to reconsider the role that the military should play in the economy. While the role of the late Meles Zenawi in establishing METEC is noted, another feature of METEC is consistent with the post-2007/08 crisis global trend induced by heightened financialisation: the increase of mega-projects and mega-farms. The author details the failings of a dam project, the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam; those of irrigated sugar mega-farms with attached factories and ethanol plants – like the Kuraz Sugar Development Project, half of which were handed over to Chinese investors; a fertiliser industry – the Yayu Fertilizer Complex; a thermal energy complex; and some ‘flexible manufacturing workshop projects’. Most projects were characterised by very limited auditing, poor financial management, slow implementation, and in some instances the embezzlement of funds. The overall inefficiency of METEC’s management then justified the privatisation of several projects. On this basis, Gebregziabher argues that the close involvement of the military seems to have pushed the party-state to depart from its very own ideology of state-led development and accelerated industrialisation, with a shift towards privatisation of state projects – as in the case of Ethiopian Airlines.

The significance of Gebregziabher’s contribution is to be understood within the broader context of political change in the ethnic politics of Ethiopia. The interests of the current premier Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo representative, and of his group diverge from the vested interests of the Tigray ethnic group within the military which has historically dominated the leadership of METEC. Among other things, this change in leadership has been key to the historical peace treaty signed in July 2018 by Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki. The treaty put an end to the ‘no war, no peace’ situation that followed the Algiers Peace Agreement in 2000; it brought an end to the border war between the two countries (1998–2000), a historically charged border conflict burdened by heavy colonial legacies (Triulzi 2007). From 2000 to 2018, the territorial dispute was submitted to an international court of arbitration and the border patrolled by UN peacekeeping forces through a demilitarised zone, which was marked by the recurrence of violent episodes that caused hundreds of casualties on both sides (Puddu 2018). Tanja Müller’s analysis of territoriality and the detente between Ethiopia and Eritrea rests on a historically grounded political analysis of the significance of territorial integrity in the Eritrean nation-state building. Adding much-needed nuance to the interpretation of a controversy that is too often portrayed in black and white, Müller collates qualitative data on soldiers’ and others’ individual perceptions and experiences of the border, to argue more broadly that actual physical border demarcation on the ground has never been as important for Eritrea’s territorial integrity as the undisputed recognition of its boundaries under international law. The continued historical neglect of the legal territorial dimension has, Müller argues, contributed to one-sided interpretations of the foreign policy of Eritrea, for which the quest for territorial integrity has been a crucial part of nation building. Taking this quest seriously allows a more nuanced understanding of past, present and future relations between the two countries.

Finally, the ROAPE Editorial Working Group invites radical political economic analysis of the Eritrean–Ethiopian detente that locates it in the broader political economy of the Horn and in the post-crisis restructuring of the global order which has influenced the Horn’s regional geopolitical dynamics. A sketch of the general lines of this analysis would highlight two major trends. The first is the role of China and the Arabic Gulf countries as competing economic and political partners, also connected to the reconfiguration of Ethiopia as a neo-extractivist economy, with oil and gas explorations and infrastructural investments in long-distance pipelines in full swing. The second is the accelerated economic growth in Ethiopia, boosted by the industrialisation programme and the consolidation of a rapidly expanding domestic market. This has increased pressures on the Ethiopian government to try to secure access to additional ports. Ethiopia, a landlocked country, is trying to break its almost exclusive dependence on the port of Djibouti which was caused by the border war with Eritrea, as shown by the deal with Somaliland to use the port of Berbera (Cannon and Rossiter 2017). In 2016 the port of Assab, in Eritrea, has become the basis of military operations led by Saudi Arabia against Yemen (United Nations Security Council 2017). The underlying United Arab Emirates (UAE)–Eritrea security agreement has turned the port of Assab into the most important military base of the UAE outside the Arabian peninsula, which includes a deep-water port under construction, a modern airbase and a military training depot (Cannon and Rossiter 2017). The second relates to global dynamics linked to the competition of two different spheres of economic and political influence over the Horn: China and the Arabian Peninsula countries. Morone has recently observed that the process of detente is being led by the new Ethiopian leadership which is using economic – rather than political or geostrategic – arguments to drive a new regional hegemony (Morone 2018). In 2018, the new leadership has emerged from a process of internal contestation within the Ethiopian establishment and represents a significant shift in the political economy of the country. The new prime minister Abiy Ahmed is a liberal reformer who has been steering away from the developmental state model to put Ethiopia squarely on the path towards neoliberalisation. In his January 2019 speech at the Word Economic Forum in Davos, Abiy Ahmed announced the intention of joining the World Trade Organization and the partial privatisation of major state companies, such as Ethiopian Airlines (Quatero Tube 2019). Politically, Ethiopia’s leadership is reversing the ethnic regionalism dynamics that have characterised the internal and external politics of Zenawi’s Ethiopia. This shift has repercussions at the regional level where Ethiopia is the hegemonic country. Writing right after the 1998 border war started, Lionel Cliffe argued that ‘regulating frontiers or ensuring access to ports can be secured, perhaps more readily, by cooperative relations between states rather than necessarily by conflict’. Back then, he argued that ‘mutual intervention amounts then to simply postponing cooperative relations, [which] may anyway not achieve its aim and will provoke in turn a great internal price’ (Cliffe 1999, 107). The argument was proved true as we are now witnessing a detente which is strongly supported by the world-systemic economic restructuring driven by China and the Arabic Gulf countries; this is opening a new scenario with oil and gas explorations which, if they come to fruition, would open a neo-extractivist pattern in Ethiopia and reconfigure the role of the Horn in the world market.

Debate and Briefings in this issue

In addition to the articles in this issue, we have a Debate piece and four Briefings. In the Debate, Nick Bernards, writing about the politics of irregular work, makes an argument for using the diverse African experiences in order to debate and rethink analytical frameworks such as ‘capitalism’, instead of to ponder whether these (accounts of) empirical realities fit, or not, particular analytical models of ‘capitalism’. Further, he points to the need for more analysis of the understanding and governance of ‘the links between the irregular forms of work that are predominant in Africa (and increasingly elsewhere) and the global circuits of capital accumulation’ (302). In the Briefings, Moses Khisa questions the ‘Africa rising’ narrative and argues that it ‘at best sits on a shaky foundation’ (304). Not only is the modest economic growth in recent years ‘superficial or not happening in the sectors that matter the most’ (Ibid.), but also the rosy picture of a rising Africa masks the continuous dire situation, including widespread poverty and precarity for the vast majority of people as well as ‘the continent’s continued marginal position in the global capitalist structures of power, domination and exploitation’ (Ibid.). Khisa also points to the mounting economic distress and political uncertainty in both democratic and authoritarian states, as well as the ‘persistence of pockets of low-intensity conflict and outright war’ (313) in various countries, and concludes: ‘Armed conflicts in these countries and the threat of outbreak in others will continue to cast a cloud on the continent’s economic prospects’ (314).

Tamás Gerőcs analyses the trajectory of African–Russian economic ties in a changing international environment. He shows how historical economic dependencies continue in a new geopolitical situation, characterised by multi-polarity. Gerőcs brings into focus areas in which Russian capital has been able to expand its presence in Africa, especially since the beginning of the 2000s, a period that saw the value of African–Russian trade grow by a factor of 15. As he highlights, Russia is returning to Africa – after the dwindling of ties in the 1990s – because of economic and geopolitical aims, while for their modernisation projects many African countries need technology and infrastructure that are cheaper than those available in the West, or that come with lighter compliance than China demands. This could reinforce a mutual economic dependency between Russian capital and groups of African elites. Gerőcs concludes that the asymmetrical nature of this relationship may lead to new economic and geopolitical dependencies, and to Russia benefiting more at the expense of African countries. In the third Briefing, Raymond Adibe, Chikodiri Nwangwu, Gerald Ezirim and Nnamdi Egonu examine maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea. In their research, the authors found that Nigeria’s conflicts over oil wealth have serious consequences for the rise in maritime insecurity across the region. The Briefing argues that only with regional collaboration is there any hope of a shift from the militarisation of maritime security to the promotion of human security and welfare.

Carin Runciman in the final Briefing analyses the recent amendments to South Africa’s Labour Relations Act, and considers what these attacks on the right to strike indicate about the state of the labour movement and working-class struggle and the prospects of trade union revival. Her assessment is that the amendments constitute the most significant changes to the country’s labour legislation since 1995: ‘[They] represent a coordinated response from state and capital to increasing levels of working-class mobilisation’ (347). In particular, they aim to constrain and contain working-class struggle by increasing the hurdles for protected strike action by unionised workers and by increasing the ability of the state to resolve strike action. Notably, there were varying positions vis-à-vis the amendments in the union movement, with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the country’s largest trade union federation, actively supporting it (suggesting that it ‘has fully embraced its role as a manager of capital’, 354), and the South African Federation of Trade Unions opposing it. Runciman regards the amendments as an attempt on the part of the alliance of COSATU, the African National Congress and capital to reassert their power and further entrench neoliberalism. The amendments come at a time when such rights are under threat everywhere around the world.

On Roape.net

To conclude, our website contributions have covered a range of issues. Farai Chipato (2019) published a blogpost on the massive influx of donor money into Zimbabwe’s civil society in the 2000s, which has created ‘briefcase NGOs’ where opportunistic ‘entrepreneurs’ attempted to draw down funding for profit, and the expansion of existing NGOs, creating employment opportunities for a growing number of careerists. Habib Ayeb’s blogpost (2019) reflects on the large number of suicides by immolation in Tunisia, averaging between 250 to 300 deaths by suicide per year since 2011. These desperate political acts are intended to draw attention to the dire social and political conditions experienced by millions of Tunisians in the years since the revolution, illuminating the significance of the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010 which triggered that revolution. Another blogpost examines the case of Kenya’s celebrated fin-tech model, M-Pesa: Milford Bateman, Maren Duvendack and Nicholas Loubere (2019) reveal a flawed system that is not an answer to poverty, but rather part of a process where contemporary capitalism continues to under-develop the continent.